Do human beings have free will?

Encyclopedia of Opinion

Question: Do human beings have free will?
Position‹4 of 4: We don’t know yet - but researchers are trying to find out
Argument: Research is underway

While we cannot currently know whether free will truly exists, with the help of researchers we should know soon.

The argument

Questions about consciousness and free will are of enduring interest in both philosophy and the sciences and scientists continue to argue about what free will is, whether we have it, and if not, why we ever thought we did in the first place. Is everything we do determined by the cause-and-effect chain of genes, environment, and the cells that make up our brain, or can we freely form intentions that influence our actions in the world? The topic is immensely complicated, and there is a need for more precise and better-informed questions. The Brain Institute has received funding that aims to create a new field - the neurophilosophy of free will. This multi-centre research programme teams up neuroscientists and philosophers to address fundamental questions of human experience around free will. Rather than asking whether people have free will, they are trying to get at more nuanced and better-defined questions. How does the brain enable conscious causal control of our actions and decisions? How do conscious intentions lead to actions? Working on Libet’s findings, which have been disproved and then un-disproved, they aim to see whether the results of these Libet-type experiments generalise to more deliberate decisions, which philosophers would tell you are more pertinent to moral responsibility. Learning about how things like volition come about has implications for the legal system, for example, which distinguishes between voluntary and involuntary actions. It also offer guidance for diseases such as Parkinson's, where movement initiation is problematic. If more is understood about how the brain produces self-initiated movements, we may be able to add another layer to the Parkinson’s research.

Premises

[P1]Whether human beings have free will remains a deeply contested question that current knowledge cannot definitively settle. [P2] Newly funded interdisciplinary research programmes are bringing neuroscientists and philosophers together to investigate more precise questions about conscious intentions, volition, and causal control of actions. [P3] This ongoing research has practical stakes for the legal system and for medical conditions like Parkinson's, giving us reason to await its results. [C] Therefore, we don't yet know whether humans have free will, but researchers are actively working to find out.

Counter-arguments

Sceptics argue that the free-will question may be constitutively philosophical, not empirically resolvable — no brain measurement can settle whether a determined choice counts as 'free,' because that turns on how freedom is defined, a conceptual rather than experimental matter. Pointing to funded research programmes shows the question is being studied, not that it is answerable; the Libet debates, which the argument itself notes have been 'disproved and un-disproved,' show how the same data get read to opposite conclusions depending on prior assumptions. On this view 'we don't know yet, but research will tell us' mistakes a definitional dispute for an open empirical one, and there is no guarantee better neuroscience will converge on an answer rather than sharpen the disagreement.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Whether a determined action counts as 'free' depends on how freedom is defined, which is a conceptual question no brain measurement can settle, so the issue may not be empirically resolvable at all. [Rejecting P2] That a research programme is funded shows the question is being studied, not that it is answerable; the endlessly re-litigated Libet experiments show the same data support opposite readings depending on prior assumptions.

The argument

Premises

Counter-arguments

Rejecting the premises

Further reading